Researching for a conference paper on Lara Croft for the Literary Dolls conference, I came across (via this report) a remarkable statistic from the game-industry research centre, EEDAR. Out of 669 current titles that had protagonists of a specific gender, only 24 of these were exclusively fronted by women. These titles sold less well than male-led games, because they received less marketing. Given that 45% of all gamers are women, and given that the average age of gamers is a mature 30 rather than a hormonal 16, this is an even more surprising gap.

When I started writing my paper, I was attempting to reject the automatic presumption that hyperbolically sexualised protaganists, such as Lara Croft, should be condemned. Or, rather, although I think such depictions are a problem in gendered terms, we need to think about more than just the sexual politics that went into their making. My paper calls for us to adopt a ludological perspective on Lara Croft. We can't just consider the representation of her gender as being a consequence of patriarchy, a role play which (following Judith Butler) demonstrates via the extreme how women should perform in reality. Rather we must consider the reasons why from a mechanical point of view such a representation might, to some extent, be necessary to the process of the game. For example, Lara's long legs are essential to navigate realistically the challenging environment that the designers have constructed. Furthermore, in the process of playing male gamers ironically occupy a female point of view, and the game's risk-reward structure is intended to reward gamers who actively seek to protect Lara and control her body in a sympathetic way; it punishes gamers who simply stand still and "gaze" at her (yep, rolling out the feminist big guns there's some Laura Mulvey in there as well).

Video games are complex, interactive media objects which operate according to a unique set of rules and codes. We cannot simply flatten a game and say that because the two-dimensional image of women that it depicts is biased or patriarchal, it therefore recapitulates gender constructions in exactly the same way as film, or the Daily Mail sidebar of shame.

However, these industry figures on female protagonists give a different slant to the issue. Is there a case for saying that, given the dearth of female characters in video games, any representation of the gender, no matter how hyperbolically sexualised, is a good thing? This is, of course, a parallel debate to that had in other areas of culture. Is it good that Katie Price has become a media mogul through exploiting her body? Should lap dancing be seen as a legitimate means of female empowerment?

Put bluntly, is the fact that players spend hours staring at Lara Croft's pert ass a good thing, if it means that at least such (male) gamers are playing a woman in the first place? Is it necessary to break ground through confirming to patriarchal desire, so that it can eventually be subverted? I'm not sure, and this is something of a tangent to my research (hence blogging about it). However, given this remarkably low starting point with so few female leads, it will be interesting to see how gender depictions play out in the new media of video games in years to come.

Labels: feminism, Game Studies, Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, video games

I have a new article out in the Alluvium journal. In "Are Video Game Narratives Postmodern?" I ask about the best way to categorise video games amid the hangover of the postmodern period. Are games naturally postmodern narratives because they develop interactively? Or does a label, such as "postmodern," lose its usefulness when it applies across such a broad spectrum of activities and cultural products?

I've noticed increasingly that cultural critics, who are usually very discerning when it comes to distinguishing realism from modernism in literature, for example, or minimalism from expressionism in the visual arts, are happy to lump games together as examples of postmodern phenomena simply because game narratives happen to be interactive and unpredictable. In this article, I challenge this presumption, and suggest that there is no one way to box games generically. Indeed, to my mind even "games" is an misleading description of the various types of activity that might come under this rubric, from a sports simulation to a puzzle game to a narratively driven representation.

This article has its origins in this blog post on gaming and literary genres, which demonstrates statistically how hard it is to label games according to one particular theory. The unique thing about games is that the medium and mechanism of representation determines the message to a very great extent. A game which is allegedly "postmodern," or "realist," or "minimalist," or whatever other aesthetic label we may want to transport from fields such as art and literature, may actually be so due to the technical platform on which a game runs: no ZX Spectrum game could ever be much other than minimalist.

Anyway, I start to digress into other fields of enquiry, so for now, head over to Alluvium and read the article in its entirety. As ever, many thanks to Caroline Edwards for editing and glossing with some well-chosen pictures, to Martin Eve as online editor, and to all those who have posted kind early comments on my Twitter feed this afternoon.

Labels: Game Studies, postmodernism, publications, video games

I have been having a relatively productive Easter writing two articles, one forthcoming in Alluvium (watch this space) and another on the representation of ageing in video games (about which I'll say more in a future blog post).

As I have been doing this, I have been thinking about the problem of terminology for what is still a relatively young discipline. When I first published on the topic three years ago, I made reference throughout to "computer games" throughout my book chapter. Writing my latest articles, I have noticed myself using "video games" and "videogames" interchangeably. Which is the correct term to use?

This is more than just a stylistic nitpicking of which we literary scholars are so fond. We need to agree upon a common term so that information is easily findable in journals and books, with metadata used consistently.

The pre-eminent journal in the field, Game Studies, describes itself as a journal of "computer game research" but the articles within it adopt "videogames," "video games" and "computer games" more or less interchangeably. Because of this variation, I have to maintain three Zetoc alerts for the three main search terms - and even these may not be sufficient, if articles happen to use more idiosyncratic phrases such as "digital games."

I have done a Google Ngram query (for "video game, videogame, computer game") which confirms my hunch, based on my general reading, that the most commonly used term today is "video games." The phrase "computer game" begins to tail off around the year 2002. The word computer is roughly synonymous with the desktop personal computer, but of course the last decade has seen a shift away from the desktop so that the major platforms now are laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and game systems such as the Xbox. "Video game," by contrast, has risen in popularity, so that today it is used roughly three times more than "computer game." On the majority vote, "video game" seems to be the term to use. It is also the more logical, since "computer game" implies games that run on computers, a term that most people would not apply to the likes of smartphones, which are an increasingly popular gaming platform.

Labels: Game Studies, video games

On Reddit, a new chart offers a useful visual typology of video game genres (shooter, RPG etc.) and platforms (Sega Megadrive, Xbox etc.).

Scraped from a historical database of 24 000 video games, the chart provides at-a-glance confirmation of significant historical changes, such as that text-based adventures peaked around the mid-1980s, and have declined to virtually nothing today. Strategy games have been more or less consistent throughout the last thirty years, whereas scrolling shooters have gradually decreased in popularity. The latter genre was common in an age when hardware could only render two-dimensional graphics, but has been supplanted by three-dimensional action shooters now; strategy games, by contrast, could evolve and adapt across different platforms because they are less dependent on graphics.

This chart of generic trends will no doubt be poured over by game historians. However, in keeping with my current research project on Reading Games: Computer Games and the Limits of Literature, I want to think - very hypothetically and off-the-cuff - about how literary themes and genres might map onto game ones, and vice versa.

The first thing to note is that there is a potential correspondence between game platforms and the main literary modes: novel, short story, drama, poetry. As Jesper Juul points out, platforms are less subject to changing interpretations: an Xbox game will not run on a SNES. In much the same way, the novel, drama and poetry are on the whole easily discriminated. A novel is generally not mistaken for a poem, or a play for a short story. Of course, there are some interestingly fuzzy edges. Is an extract from verse drama capable of standing alone as a poem? How long does a short story have to be before it becomes a novella, or novel? By and large, though, our definitions of these forms are fairly robust. The similarity between games and literature is possible because the criteria of "platform" is determined according to the physical media on which meanings are produced, not how those meanings are styled.

The major difference, however, is that game platforms are far more diverse and fragmented than writing "platforms." The chart includes 34 different gaming platforms, ranging from the mobile phone to the ZX Spectrum to the PC. Novels may come in all shapes and sizes, but we would not say that a cloth-bound text is a fundamentally different media to a softback, because most of the significance of the text is embodied in the story it communicates and not in the medium it uses (although interestingly the rise of the ebook and hypertext may be shifting our preconceptions about this).

At a quick glance, I would guess that a similar pair of charts for literature would show inverse trends to that for games. The chart for literary "platforms" (novel, poetry etc.) would have relatively few different colours, and thus would look more like the chart for game genres which has just 14 separate strands. The chart for literary genre, by contrast, would be massively chaotic, looking more like the chart for game platforms which has 34 different colours. In gaming, then, it is the platform - or medium of production of meanings - that is more variable than genre.

Certainly, within literature, it is when we get to the level of genre rather than "platform" that things become most messy. It is relatively easy to distinguish a play from a novel, but somewhat harder to distinguish a satire from a comedy, or a mock-epic from satire, or parody from farce. Labels of genre are notoriously slippery. Postmodern literature, indeed, brings these conflicts and overlappings to the foreground of the text. As I recently noted in this essay, contemporary works like China Mieville's The City and the City or Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go are fascinating because they seem intuitively to be science fiction, but as soon as we start to try to put our finger on the conventional technological imaginaries that are inherent to the genre we find they are not there, and their "proper" genre remains elusive.

A critic of the game chart could perhaps argue that such a mess should also be apparent here too, but that the chart is instead artificially uniform. Are there really just 14 or so different game genres? One could certainly argue about the categorisations used here, which are necessarily subjective. For example, when does an arcade game - which on this chart is a consistently dominant genre - become an action adventure? Many people would identify Space Invaders as an arcade game, by virtue of the physical space in which it was played in the 1980s, namely amusement arcades. At this early stage of game history, genre is quite correspondent with platform, as is epitomised by the use of the term "arcade" as both a genre and a platform. However, if updated today Space Invaders would probably manifest itself as a space-based shooter framed by other elements of play; it would no doubt allow a player to interact with other characters, with missions embedded within an ongoing story. Does this make it an arcade game, an adventure or an RPG? Even another early game like Elite could be said to be all three at once.

So out of this chaotic and colourful pattern of genres and platforms, are there any useful questions that can be asked?

From a culturally materialist point of view, the interesting issue to explore is the degree to which genres and the medium or platform on which they are produced are interlinked. Marxist critics of the novel such as Ian Watt or Raymond Williams contend that the novel arose at a time when printing had become widely available and affordable. It catered to the tastes of a newly middle-class reading public, and as a consequence the genre that is most closely associated with the novel is realism, the depiction of comparatively ordinary life, as opposed to heroic or epic romance that had been the preserve of poetry, which was disseminated orally or via song to courtly audiences.

Despite the diversity and fragmentation of game platforms, it is not hard to figure out that a similar relationship between medium and message will apply here. For example, the sudden growth of mobile gaming on the iPhone or iPad (which in this chart provides around a third of platforms) is surely an explanation for the sudden spurt in the puzzle genre from the mid-2000s onwards. Mobile hardware, and the circumstances in which games are played on it (often in short bursts while on the move) elicits different types of games. Similarly, I would guess that most RPGs are played on PC systems, because the mouse allows for the fine control of a complex interface, whereas shooters dominate on next generation arcade platforms like Xbox and Playstation.

The one further question to ask, though, is the degree to which platforms and genre are necessarily interdependent, and the degree to which games and/or literature can resist the stylistic expectations placed upon it by the underlying platform. Although certain game platforms may lend themselves better to certain genres, such as the RPG on the PC, this is not an exclusive link. RPGs like The Elder Scrolls or Mass Effect, for example, have been extremely popular on consoles as well. Similarly, supposedly "mobile" and casual devices like the iPad are increasingly being used for immersive adventures.

By contrast, I would hypothesise that when a literary "platform" starts adopting genres that are conceived as being more appropriate for a different "platform" of production, this is construed as ironically disruptive. In modernist writers like James Joyce, for example, the introduction of different typographies - such as advertising headlines - into a physically conventional novel like Ulysses was provocative. In A.S. Byatt's postmodernist Possession, carefully-contrived Victorian poems and archival letters are placed in amongst a twentieth-century campus fiction so that we are unsure whether we are reading a fictional novel or a historical study. Even Shakespeare, in plays like Othello, has his villain Iago speak largely in prose to distinguish him disturbingly from the rest of the characters who converse in blank verse.

Thus readers have preconceived notions of what style or genre is appropriate to what literary "platform." When these conventions are broken, the result is ironic and self-conscious. By contrast, I doubt that any gamer has felt that if they boot up an RPG on an Xbox, or a puzzler on a PC, or an arcade game on an iPhone they are having their expectations played with. Game platforms and game genres may be less conventionally correlated than literary media and literary genre may be.

Labels: English Literature, Game Studies, genre, video games

Will Self’s LRB diary on video games epitomises some typically slippery reactions to the new media. Whilst superficially it seems to be an honest and admirable attempt to explore the value of the video games that he watches his sons play, underpinning it are some basic but unspoken assumptions about the more affirmative qualities of literature.

Self’s essay opens with a literary point of reference. Self wonders what the American critic Northrop Frye would have made of video games. He proposes that he would have observed approvingly that video games embody a mythological cast of characters, archetypes in Northrop Frye’s sense. Based on this tradition, Self acknowledges that he is happiest about games “when the kill zone is decked out in the furniture of established Nordic folklore – dragons, frost giants, axe-wielding berserkers.” In the likes of Skyrim or World of Warcraft, at least, the enemies are clearly fictionalised representations. By contrast, Call of Duty dresses up in graphically realist terms a pastiche of historical and embodied reality. As a consequence:

even perpetrating the second death of a [Nazi] zombie diminishes the game-player, because it necessarily exposes him to all the grotesque nonsense the game’s writers have cooked up out of Third Reich horrors – the concentration camps, Mengele, the Mittelbau-Dora rocket factories and so forth – and then spiced with anachronistic steam punk conceits.

Self takes his kids to the National Army Museum and futilely tries to explain the true impact of a .50 calibre machine gun on human flesh. So far, then, Self seems quite discriminatory, acknowledging that the different formal expressions of video games give rise to different ethical responses. He evaluates more positively those which lack “the Hitleriana or queasy overlapping with real-time conflicts that make Call of Duty so disturbing.” He does not impulsively lump all games together as a medium, each equally as bad as the other because they all involve killing, whatever guise the victims take.

This is a nuance that we might expect from an author who has made some quite strident formal judgements in his literary career. Most recently his novel Umbrella has proposed, through its assertively modernist technique, that the most important project of literature is to represent the human mind in a way faithful to its subjective meanderings and obscurities. Not all games are equally dubious merely by virtue of the fact that most involve violence, just as not all literature is equally good merely because it involves the representation of people. Style is everything.

However, Self then makes a different and unexpected turn, looking at Paul Trout’s work on Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination. Trout argues that the human experience of predation provided the “selective pressure that led not only to mimesis – and hence narrative – but even to language itself.” Fictions (whether literature, religion or games) reproduce predatory, flesh-ripping beasts in mythic form, the better to save us from actual confrontations in the wild. Style is only one element of artwork; biological adaptation is another significant one.

Games now seem to fit within the one evolutionary rubric. Self argues that even those games like Skyrim or World of Warcraft, which are superficially and even cartoonishly mythical, are also subversively structured to reward killing. Doubly dangerous is the fact that the player is let off with the lesson that killing does not really have consequences for themselves: “the fact remains that these players – unlike the poor infantrymen at the Battle of Mons – rarely encounter their own death, and if they do they’re speedily and electronically resurrected.” Games thus fail to inculcate important moral values about the true significance of war. At the same time, because of the perpetual threat of death imminent in all games, these fictions offer universal lessons in Trout’s evolutionary terms. Games are both formally distinguishable – hence Skyrim is better than Call of Duty – and adaptively identical.

This is an interesting double-standard, and it is one we see in contemporary literary criticism also. For better or worse, literary theory has become dominated by evolutionary psychology or literary Darwinism, which attempts to explain the instrumental function of literature. Far from being “cheesecake for the mind,” as Steven Pinker famously construed the arts, literature came about and is still valuable because it offers a self-contained model of human behaviour that allows us better to prepare for real-world interactions. Literature is intrinsically purposeful, a "motivational guidance system" as Joseph Carroll has it. At the same time, traditional literary criticism teaches us that certain books are better than others in aesthetic terms. As many critics of literary Darwinism have pointed out, it is not at all clear that aesthetic and evolutionary criteria are correlated. A book may be artistically well-constructed, but offer few readily-available pointers for life in reality (Self’s own Umbrella might be one such work). Conversely, a work of literature that is judged weaker on aesthetic grounds may be more useful from an evolutionary point of view (presumably borrowing Paul Trout’s perspective, the array of ghoulish figures in J.R.R. Tolkien makes him a more adaptively valuable author than Geoffrey Chaucer with his pilgrims).

So both games and literature can be attacked from two non-exclusive points of view. On the one hand, they may be aesthetically more or less pleasing, so that the mythical world of Skyrim is, for Self, preferable to the historicist Call of Duty, or the stream-of-consciousness of Umbrella preferable to the conventional realist novel. On the other hand, all media are universally tapping in to some basic evolutionary instincts. If this same dualism applies both to games and literature, what then is the problem with Self’s position on games?

The issue here lies in what precise evolutionary instinct the two media are being defined against, as the penumbra for what they always do, regardless of how well – aesthetically – they individually set about doing it. For literature, the consequences of it being good or bad aesthetically, and good or bad evolutionarily, can be construed by negation. At worst aesthetically a bad book is a waste of the reader’s time, and at worst evolutionarily we have not learnt from it how to function in the social world. Indeed, we may read an aesthetically good book in spite of the fact that it does not seem adaptively useful. Whatever books are for in an evolutionary sense does not immediately impinge upon our aesthetic evaluations.

Games, however, have their aesthetic merits undermined by the reference to violent evolutionary values which they inculcate in a positivistic fashion. A game like Call of Duty is, according to Self, worse than Skyrim because it dresses up history as realism whilst eliding the ethical truth. However, once games are placed generically beneath the evolutionary umbrella, both can cause or encourage violence in their players because they are underpinned by the same adaptive motivation – of escaping or defeating the predator. In achieving this, all games demonstrate a flippant type of violence in which it seems only to have cartoonish consequences. Games, in other words, do just enough to act as simulations of violence to help us in an evolutionary sense, but not quite enough to make the consequences sufficiently severe so that we realise the dangers of being violent in the real world. Games, then, are pinched uneasily by this evolutionary standard, whereas our critical evaluations of good or bad literature can escape its clutches.

In his article, Self makes no direct reference or comparison between games and literature, save indirectly via Northrop Frye, which perhaps makes my accusation that there are two different measures at work across the two media somewhat unfair. But I think actually this proves a useful point. Literature always provides the baseline by which we assess the newer media, and as a consequence it can remain implicit or unmentioned whilst still having a logical impact on the argument. Here the fact that Self chooses to think of games with reference to a work of evolutionary theory that explains narrative in terms of violence is surely significant; had he wanted to treat literature with reference to biology, he would almost certainly have turned to numerous other texts which connect it to other adaptive traits such as empathy, social modelling, and emotional robustness. Indeed, even readers who are not aware of evolutionary literary theories will be intrinsically familiar with and accepting of the register of basic human sympathy which runs through this type of criticism, whilst intuitively rejecting the lexicon of violence used for games.

The best evidence for Self’s underlying literary presumptions comes in the following paragraph. Again, Self is observing his son playing Skyrim, a game which he wants, despite his impulsive resistance, to comprehend because it seems to draw on Frye’s mythic archetypes:

Even after my son’s proxy resurrected the bogie – “I do that a lot. I bring him back and then I punch him to death again” – I still kept faith with the game, which also involves the reading of quite large chunks of runic text.

Notice how his “keeping faith” is vindicated by the fact that the game involves text, thus construing his momentary effort to come to terms with games as something he almost has to justify or explain to his presumed reader. Self goes on:

I was right to, because eventually, once we had defeated various frost trolls and sex-changing lizard men, and reached Windhelm, it transpired that my son had built a gabled house in this Arctic community, and even acquired a wife. “My wife is a very nice lady,” he told me, as a rather cowed-looking figure in a rough woollen dress shuffled about in the background. “She runs a store and gives me money every few days.” “Oh, really,” I said, desperate to clutch at these straws of domesticity. “And what’s your wife’s name?” Without pausing in the ceaseless toggling of thumb-on-lever he said: “I don’t know.”

Labels: English Literature, evolution, Game Studies, literary theory, video games, Will Self

My short article on "Ulysses as an RPG" has just been published in the Alluvium journal. This article is a somewhat speculative effort to draw some connections between games and literature at a phenomenological level, in this case pitching Joyce's innovative text up against our most recent model of narrative. 

Labels: Game Studies, Ulysses, University Life

At the excellent Forms of Innovation conference, I very much enjoyed a keynote paper by Ian Davidson, in which he examined the treatment and representation of space and movement in a series of poems, moving from print sources, to the poem-film Dakota to Jim Andrew's hypertext "Seattle Drift." In this post, I want to challenge a casual comment Davidson made about the latter, which I think embodies an important lesson to learn when studying electronic literature.

The poem "Seattle Drift" consists of five lines:

I'm a bad text.
I used to be a poem
but drifted from the scene.
Do me.
I just want you to do me.

Taken at face value, the poem seems to embody a lightly sado-masochistic sense, with that teasing request to "do me" as punishment for being "bad." But this erotic tone is modified by the three hyperlink options at the top of the poem, which invite us to "Do the Text," "Stop the Text," or "Discipline the Text." The former causes the words to disperse and drift erratically across the screen. It has become literally a "bad text," moving restlessly and therefore being largely unreadable.

It seems significant that the hyperlinks are written in small red type which is difficult to read, and that they appear above the poem, which will be our natural first point of focus because of its larger white text. If the links appeared obviously below, the poem would seem to issue a command which we then automatically follow. As it is, though, the poem seems ironically unaware that we can indeed carry out the action it tauntingly asks us to. Yet even as we break apart this "bad poem" by "doing it," the poem breaks us as readers, because it becomes illegible as it moves.

If we "stop the text" mid flow, though, the movement pauses, and the words may form new quasi-phrases based on their new configuration. This perhaps invites us to think about how a poem or poetic forms may drift between different traditions: the starting form of the poem looks quite traditional - perhaps an example of modernist imagism; the animated poem is a child of the electronic era; and the paused animation is like a concrete poem that represents a different strand of modernist poetics (see below).


Disciplining the text puts the reader back into control, as the words return to their original shape, to how the poem "used to be." The irony here is that once we loop back to the beginning, the poem that we see on screen, which mockingly apologises for being a "bad text," is actually a more traditional (and therefore "good") poetic text than the scattered poem it can potentially become if we click the "Do the Text" hyperlink again.

There are, then, multiple ironies at work here that set up a dialogue between the poem and the reader, being both figuratively and practically interactive. The poem speaks to us - "do me" - little suspecting that if we discover the hyperlinks above it we can indeed "do it." But even as we carry out this command, the text wins back because it becomes unreadable. So far, then, this is a fairly conventional reading of the poem, treating it as text which happens to be interactive. However, it is important in looking at interactive literature that we also delve deeper.

In examining the middle, movement function Davidson made a passing comment that the jerky movement of the words in the middle phase is a result of the old technology of the web page coding ("Seattle Drift" having been written in 1997). This remark troubles me. There seem to be several possible ways in which "Seattle Drift" might vary depending on the particular technology on which the HTML is displayed. For example, an older computer might animate the movement more slowly than a modern one. Displaying the text on a larger screen (such as my 27 inch monitor) means that there is more black space to the right and below for the poem to move into, before the words drift entirely off screen. The poem would offer a different sense if played on a mobile phone screen. As a performative experience, the poem is not medium-neutral: changing the medium on which it runs also changes the range and representative possibilities of the poem.

Thus if we want to provide the fullest possible interpretation of the poem, we need to go to the original source code, which will offer clues as to Andrews' intention, prior to that code running on any particular device. The poem is coded using DHTML, which is indeed an older and now largely superseded technology, though still perfectly functional for the purposes of the animated poem; there is nothing in principle in DHTML which means that the words must jiggle as erratically as they do, rather than smoothly.

When we dig into the function that causes the movement, we find that actually the jerky motion is one determined by Andrews. The following code determines if a given word will move to the left or right, or up or down, with each given cycle:

function moveMe(aword, x, y) {
// This function handles text movement for IE 4+.
// The Math.random function generates a random number between 0 and 1
awordx=Math.random();
awordy=Math.random();
// If the x component random number is less than 0.5, then move the word
// to the left by doit pixels.
if (awordx <= 0.5) { aword.left = parseInt(aword.left) - doit; } else { // Else if the x component is greater than 0.5, move the word to the right // by x*doit pixels. aword.left = parseInt(aword.left) + x*doit; }

There is a further bit of code to ensure there is a bias towards downward and right movement, so that the words are highly unlikely to vanish off the left or top of the screen. It is important to note here that Andrews uses the random function only to determine if the word will move left or right, or up and down, at a given interval. He does not use a random function to determine how far each word might move. Instead, the range of movement is statically regulated by this function:

function moveIt() {
// This function is run upon loading the document (see the BODY statement).
// It is always running when the document is loaded. This is done by means
// of the setTimeout function. Essentially, there is a 15 millisecond
// delay between calls to this function.
moveMe(document.getElementById('SEATTLE').style, 4, 2);
moveMe(document.getElementById('DRIFT').style, 3, 2);
moveMe(document.getElementById('Im1').style, 4, 1);
moveMe(document.getElementById('a2').style, 5, 3);
...
setTimeout('moveIt()', 15);

The style elements in brackets determine how many pixels to the left or right or up or down each word will migrate. What this means is that certain words will move more than others. Thus "Seattle" will only move 4 horizontally and 2 vertically, whereas the first "a" will move 5 and 3 respectively. This can be seen easily when running the program, as the "a" very rapidly runs towards the bottom right of the screen, whereas the "Seattle Drift" title stays more or less towards the top left, its original position. So Andrews' intention here is that even though the words jiggle into a new configuration, they still retain a lingering sense of the original from which they have drifted (as best defined by the more static title which remains on top). Indeed, one could make a further observation that the elements given the largest movement ranges are the two "a" letters (allocated 5, 3 and 5, 5) and "the" (allocated 5, 5). Andrews allows these minor words to drift away and disintegrate from the original poem, whereas words which we might judge to be more important - such as "drifted" (range of 1,3) or "Seattle Drift" (4, 2 and 3, 2) - remain closer to their original positions. Of course, one could read Andrews intentions to the pixel-point of absurdity. But my point here is that Andrews has certainly wanted to achieve a markedly different effect to that which would have been achieved by assigning a random pixel movement to each one.

Furthermore, the jerky motion that Davidson noted is not due to technological limitations. It is instead a consequence of Andrews having assigned rigid rather than random movement ranges to individual words, coupled with the 15 millisecond delay between loops. If one alters the code so that the delay is 1 millisecond, with each word allowed to move 1 pixel vertically and 1 horizontally, the effect is much smoother.

Thus Andrews has determined that although the words will "drift," they will not do so with the subtle smoothness that word implies. Instead, the words deliberately saccade, so that even in movement this is a "bad" poem, not living up to its promise to drift but instead jerking somewhat (but not entirely) erratically.

What the above analysis shows, then, is that it is important not simply to read a text written specifically for the digital medium in the same way we would a printed text. It is possible to carry out a decent interpretation of "Seattle Drift" looking at it from a phenomenological point of view - that is, the ways in which we perceive the poem as we both read and then interact with it. However, the way the poem presents and generates these perceptive possibilities may also be affected by the medium on which it runs (for example, a larger monitor gives the poem more space to drift). To discount this effect, rather like a scientist tries to control for or eliminate mitigating factors we need also to examine source code. Oddly, this brings (electronic) literary theory back to privileging the notion of authorial (or coder's) intentions, something that mainstream literary criticism sees as somewhat unfashionable as a basis for interpretation.

Labels: digital humanities, electronic literature, Game Studies, Seattle Drift

Can video games be classed as art? This is the challenging aesthetic question I address in my new essay, Video Games as Successful Art.

Drawing on the work of Tom Bissell, I offer one definition of "art" that seems to fit very well with video games, as well as with literature and paintings. In this case, art is defined as a work which makes full use of the opportunities for expression that are available to it. Video games have available to them multiple media for expression (audio-visual, simulation, gameplay satisfaction), and this definition of art suggests that video games must satisfy a wider range of criteria for "success" than other creative forms. Usefully, this definition also means that we can still treat older games, which fully exploited the hardware of their own generation, as being artful in their own way.

The full essay is available here.

Labels: Game Studies, Photography and Art, video games

My review of Salman Rusdhie's Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) is now available to read.

This is a children's fantasy, adopting Rushdie's usual mode of magic realism. However, as a fantasy novel Luka is unconvincing and undramatic, and although the novel has an interesting twist on magic realism as it is set within a computer game, Rushdie misses the opportunity to comment upon virtual culture in an insightful way.

The full review can be read here: Luka and the Fire of Life.

Labels: English Literature, Game Studies, Luka and the Fire of Life, magic realism, Salman Rushdie

My essay on Fredric Jameson's theory of "cognitive mapping" and Grand Theft Auto has now been published in Writing Technologies.

Labels: English Literature, Fredric Jameson, Game Studies, Grand Theft Auto, postmodernism

There is naturally a great deal of interest surrounding the trial of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian responsible for the killing of 77 people in a nationalist terrorist attack. Currently, the media are reporting on his comments that he spent a year playing the online role playing game, World of Warcraft, for around 16 hours a day.

Labels: 1910 Paris Floods, aggression, Anders Breivik, Game Studies, video games

Watching the news of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami unfolding early on Friday morning, the spectacle seemed to develop into an exquisitely cruel plot, as if nature herself was some sort of orchestrator in a theatre of destruction: the first act being the shaking of the earth, the second the wave of water, the third the fire, the fourth the frozen weather – and now, days later, the final, human authored act has begun, in the form of a nuclear meltdown.

But even as this dramatic metaphor began to take root, the feeling that this was somehow a creatively designed destruction reawakened in me a peculiar memory from my childhood that led me to frame it in terms that were, on the face of it, wholly inappropriate. The sense of nature’s play reminded me of my own child's play, my computer games, when I used to spend hours absorbed in Sim City. In this game, one would craft a utopian metropolis along rational lines, zoning organised blocks of residences and industry, initiating complex urban transport schemes, laying down a web of electrical and water infrastructure. Gradually, out of a flat, brown map, skyscrapers and chemical plants, factories and high speed railways modelled into an urban ideal – a world that, like the popular image of Japan itself, was precise, engineered, technologised.

Yet as the game went on, such utopianism came to seem too easy, and a little bit dull. The constrained architecture of town planning gave way to the freedom of destruction. Alongside the palette of planning tools lay another palette to undo all that careful work: earthquakes, fires, floods, nuclear meltdown and, bizarrely, a Godzilla-esque monster could be unleashed in sequence. That delicate network of roads and districts would shake, then turn red with fire, then blue with water. In those early days of computing, the sequential animated disasters would push my processor to its limit, and eventually the game itself would crash in a final eschatology that pulled one sharply out of the game world, and back into a mundane reality.

Watching those news reports, then, I could not help but feel that peculiar sense of omnipotent sadism that I had once before encountered through a technological lens. This time, the menu bars of Sim City had been replaced by multiple ticker tape overlays, as the BBC news carried live feeds from local channels, which in turn carried amateur video footage. The lower, local news feed gave word of a tsunami, whilst the higher-level and delayed BBC feed was still just scrolling across details of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake; like my old computer, the screen could not keep up with events. From this point, information flashed past at an exhilarating rate, with a sequence of disasters just like those I used to combine as a kid. And even if I was not in control of this real, human-world chaos, I understood the thrill of unleashing apocalypse in perverse ways – water causing fires, boats floating down streets, in one string of tweets on the internet, whether comic or serious or just mistranslated, warnings of a possible mutant caused by the nuclear meltdown.

Nature, it seems, like my cruel childhood self, has a twisted humour. Yet hers was also a bewildering narrative, perhaps explaining why I alighted on a seemingly inapt memory in order to try to structure the events. Looking on at a distance through the television media, it was so hard to connect the local and the global, the small and the large: to connect those tiny cars scurrying along highways away from the tsunami, with the human lives they must have contained; to connect that initial cresting wave rolling across the calm blue of the Pacific (so that one almost expected to see a miniature surfer at its head) with that sludgy brown mass that bullied cars, houses, ships across fields; to connect the decay of atoms in a reactor to the vast evacuation radius that has become the target for nuclear meltdown. It is, of course, making such connections that would be performed by a deity – or by belief in one. And it is not surprising that such apocalyptic events form the ash out of which religions arise.

Yet this is not how it can work for an irreligious person like myself. Instead, like a true humanist, I turned to a secular narrative from our digitised modernity. In his book on The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode saw in religious stories of apocalypse some of the qualities that make us want to write and read literary narratives: authored works impose the order of plot on the chaos of the world, and provide the random with some form of explanation, making sense of the ending. This is why, although it seemed so inappropriate in the moment, I naturally turned to my memory of my computer game, where I got to play town mayor, city planner and, in destruction, God. Recollecting that sense of control and logic that I once authored through the game allowed me to establish some order behind the chaotic entropy being suffered by one of the most engineered, technologised nations on Earth.

Labels: 1910 Paris Floods, Game Studies, Japanese earthquake, Sim City, tsunami, video games